Screaming Into the Wind
by Evangeline Douglas
Summary: The wind caresses her face and steals her voice, just as she always knew it would. Katara could bend and change, but sometimes, when she has time to think, she wonders whether she changed too much. Whether she was too much her own element; powerful, mighty, but not fierce. It doesn't matter. She's fighting the wind now, and somehow it's not much different than before.


_Disclaimer: I own nothing but the words on the page that are not names or places or trademarked terms of any sort. That's it._

Screaming Into the Wind

Aang is ecstatic when Tenzin is born, and Katara can't help but wonder whether this one will be an airbender. Actually, she knows, but she has no intention of telling her husband.

He finds out soon enough, when the snow is just melted and the panda lilies he planted at the Western Air Temple have begun to poke out of the ground. Tenzin has recently turned five, and Katara thinks he must be allergic to the pollen on the trees because he can't stop sneezing, and then suddenly he's twenty feet in the air.

It's more often now that Katara wakes to an empty bed and the smothered whimpering of her daughter in the other room, only ten years old and already abandoned by her father. Aang thinks that taking Tenzin to ride the elephant koi is a crucial part of airbending training, and Katara lost the energy to argue with him years ago. There's no use fighting the wind. It blows around and whips her clothes and disappears just as suddenly as it came.

Tenzin barely winces as his father's acolytes tattoo his skin. Bumi sneaks jealous glances and Kya refuses to look at all. Aang stands over his son, beaming proudly, and Katara pretends not to notice that her knuckles are white where she grips her older children's hands. Or maybe it's just that she's pretending not to know she's more angry than worried.

Zuko, Katara notices, always seems to pay special attention to Kya and Bumi when the family visits him, though he does his best not to exclude Tenzin. Not that Tenzin would ever notice, what with Aang taking him up to the volcanoes on Ember Island and the rooftops in the capital. Even so, Katara questions him one evening after he's smoothed out a nasty fight between her two older children. A faraway look enters his eyes. "I just want them to know they're good enough."

Aang nearly begins dancing around the kitchen when Tenzin announces he's dating Lin. Toph is less impressed. "All your kid wants to do is impress you, Twinkle Toes. He should be impressing me." Katara rolls her eyes and asks Kya when she's bringing Siluk home for dinner. The Avatar, great bridge between man and spirit, whirls around. "When did you start dating?" Almost three years, Kya doesn't say.

Nobody can throw a boomerang like Sokka, but Bumi likes to think he comes pretty close. He and Katara practice often, when he's home from his latest stint with the United Forces, and she throws icicles at him that he knocks away with his weapon. Aang stumbles upon them once, and he regards his son with a lopsided grin that Katara has learned to dread. "Momo," he calls in a manner not quite befitting his deep voice. "Marbles, please." Bumi protests that his boomerang isn't a cute trick, and it seems Aang is the one offended in the end. He comes to her in the night to murmur that Bumi doesn't appreciate the skill involved in spinning marbles. His wife turns away from him.

Kya disappeared months ago, leaving Katara a note about finding herself and forgetting Siluk's untimely demise at the flippers of the polar seal he was hunting. Katara sends her blessings across the oceans, hoping Kya knows she loves her. Aang weeps on Appa for a time, but Katara soon convinces him it wasn't his fault. That doesn't stop her from wondering, even if she hates herself after. Bumi comes home on leave for a week, and Princess Izumi and Toph occasionally pass along letters to Kya's mother.

It doesn't take long for Bumi to become a Commander in the United Forces. Zuko sends his congratulations to the family, but he sends another letter specifically for Bumi, who sprawls out on the couch with it long after Aang has gone to bed. Katara tells him she's proud, but she isn't sure how convincing she is when she tells him Aang is too. Bumi taps the paper in his hand. "Fire Lord Zuko has given me his blessing to marry Izumi." It's the most serious she's ever seen her elder son. "He only gives it after you've been promoted?" Bumi shakes his head. "A year ago. I told him I wouldn't ask her until I got the promotion and his blessing in writing."

Zuko invites her to the palace once, midwinter, when Aang is away dealing with a debacle between the swampbenders and some Earth Kingdom travelers (she's pretty sure Aang just wanted to go somewhere). Her old friend's invitation is vague, and she gets the distinct feeling nobody is supposed to know about it. Curiosity appropriately piqued, Katara digs out some generic traveling clothes, takes the blue beads out of her hair, and catches the first ship to the Fire Nation. She's there in a week. Bumi and Izumi are married the day she arrives in an old temple that the rest of the world forgot about. When she asks him about it, Zuko flashes a rare smile and says the council doesn't care, so long as the Fire Lord has an heir, and they wanted to elope. Katara rolls her eyes. He's such a hopeless romantic, that Zuko.

Iroh is born precisely ten months after the wedding, and Aang sends his congratulations (with a few sly remarks directed at Zuko) to the palace. Katara sends hers to her son. Aang wonders, later, why she dotes on the golden eyed boy, and Katara sends Bumi a look. But it's his secret, not hers. The Avatar's grandson will be Fire Lord someday, Zuko muses, and Katara can't help but comment that she'd be more impressed if the Avatar knew about it. Zuko smirks. "The last Avatar didn't know his great-grandson would be Fire Lord either." She doesn't find the comparison satisfying, but then there's a tired mother with gold-rimmed glasses coming around the corner. The young woman collapses into her father's shoulder, and Katara lets it be.

Bumi blows into his childhood home with the force of a hundred tsunamis, five year-old Iroh in tow. "He's a firebender, Mom!" Katara leaps from her seat with an agility she thought she'd lost a decade ago and wraps her boy in a hug. "Congratulations, Bumi," she murmurs into his unruly brown hair. Iroh pulls away from his father, golden eyes twinkling, and he screws up his face in a way that reminds her so much of Zuko it hurts. A tiny flame flickers in his palm, and Katara holds a drop of water in her own hand and shows him how he can evaporate it. Then they're gone like the water and Aang is there, bemoaning the destruction outside. Apparently, Tenzin broke up with Lin.

Things are a bit tense after that. Toph hasn't been seen in months, and Katara has a sneaking suspicion she's gone the way of Kya. Suyin married Baatar a few years ago, and the three of them seem to have worked things out (Katara never approved of Toph's parenting style, and she knows she's right). But Lin is a different matter entirely, and she wants to know her father. Katara doesn't blame her, though it mystifies Aang. Zuko sends letters to Lin, who mostly ignores them for a few weeks until she drops everything and goes to the Fire Nation on an extended vacation. Things aren't as tense for a while after that, and it's nice to have Pema around.

Aang is the first, aside from Tenzin and Pema, to hold Gyatso. He wonders if he'll be an airbender, and Katara winces as she suddenly sees herself in Pema's place with Aang standing over her, looking for signs of the air. Bumi visibly flinches when Aang presents Gyatso to Republic City, welcoming his first grandchild to the world. Katara sends him one of her pointed looks, reminding her son that he brought this on himself. Iroh's younger brother has just begun to walk.

Gyatso doesn't live past his first month. Aang mourns his airbender. Katara mourns Tenzin's son.

The spirit begins to leave Aang in the first month of fall that year. His wife holds his head in her lap and calls him an excellent father and a devoted husband in the first days of winter. Neither of his older children come, but Aang has Tenzin, and he's only ever _needed_ Tenzin. Bumi brings his boys to the funeral, one arm around Izumi, and the world gasps. Katara feels the glaring from her friends and family, as if they know she knew. Zuko holds her while she cries, but neither of them is sure whether she weeps for her dead husband or for this mess she's allowed to turn into skeletons in the closet.

Toph barges into her bedroom in the middle of the night a few weeks after Meelo is born, just after Zuko abdicates and leaves the throne to Izumi. Bumi was at her side for the coronation. "You lied to us!" Katara pushes herself out of her bed and guides Toph out to the balcony. "I never lied to any of you. We just didn't tell anybody." She looks down at the younger woman, shocked to see that Toph's hair has gone as grey as her own, and squeezes her hand. "Bumi didn't want people to know," Toph mutters. Katara nods. "We never lied, but we never told the truth either." Toph slugs her in the shoulder, and Katara is grateful for the farewell. Her friend glides back into the night, back into her world of the last several years. They never speak again.

It took Toph years to confront her about it, and none of the rest acknowledge it. Bumi's secret family blows over in the wake of the discovery of the new Avatar (if Bumi is annoyed that he's being ignored for another airbender, he's learned to hide it). He has a daughter now, a rather average firebender who has been quickly taking an interest in blades. Zuko seems rather satisfied with the development, Bumi tells her, and if Mai were alive she'd be proud.

Sokka brings Korra to her three years after Toph's final disappearance. The girl bends earth, fire, and water, and Katara knows air will come eventually, but she's not in the mood for airbending just then, so they focus on the water and leave the other elements for later. Korra thrives, even if she's occasionally bored, and Sokka finds an unholy amount of glee in watching his sister struggle to teach the Avatar again. She's glad she can distract him, anyway, even if he is laughing at her. Suki isn't handling the cold so well these days, and Sokka will be taking her home in a few weeks. They all know it's the last time.

Her brother returns to the South Pole a little quieter, a little older. But then, she's older too, and so is Kya, whose hair is the color of the tundra. Katara's little girl has deep wrinkles now, popping up in places they never used to. Sometimes Katara wonders what kind of mother her daughter would have been, but she banishes those thoughts most days. She'll never tell her daughter (yet another thing she'll never tell) that she has the wind in her too. Kya is like her father, a bit flighty, blowing in and out of her life with a steadiness that Katara knows better than to depend upon. It doesn't hurt. Stopped hurting decades ago, really, and it's nice to be permitted a few glimpses of her late husband from time to time. Besides, Kya intends to stay this time. On those days that Katara has too many thoughts and no Korra to distract her, she studies her daughter. Sometimes, it seems, wounds can only fester so long before a person gets used to them. Kya and Bumi have both had enough time now. Kya, finally, is ready to rest.

Korra grows into a strong Avatar, certainly more worldly than Aang, but perhaps not as gifted in peace. Just the same, she leads the world through civil wars and uprisings until, somehow, everything is at peace and only Katara's bones are restless. Bumi has become an airbender, which delights and baffles his younger children, though Iroh takes the whole thing with a quiet amusement. When questioned, he smiles and shakes his head. "My father is a surprising man." Katara supposes he's right. Zuko looks at her over his teacup as if to say, in that dry tone of his youth, "No kidding."

They're the only ones left. Sokka never really recovered from his injuries after defeating the Red Lotus in Korra's childhood, and Toph isn't coming back. Katara can feel that she's gone from this world, and sometimes she looks over at Zuko, running his fingers over some piece of metal, and she knows he feels it too. There's less and less of Aang in Korra every day, though Katara isn't sure whether it's more to do with the girl's strong personality or her own failing memory. Zuko has come to visit her in the South Pole, and she knows when she sees him. At ninety-five, he walks with a slumped back, a far cry from his once imperial posture, and his face is thinner than she remembers. He coughs badly, though he tries to hide it, and she knows. She knows she'll be the only one left, soon. Aunt Wu's promises of a long life have never felt so much like a curse.

She runs a hand across the roughness of his scar one afternoon as he snores quietly. Then she's back in the catacombs, wondering what if she'd healed him, what if she'd forgiven him sooner, what if she'd stayed out of the way during that Agni Kai, what if, what if. Suddenly she'd give anything to have more time with him, with any of them, really, but he's there and the only one besides her and it breaks her heart that he's about to leave her, so she keeps watch until he opens his eyes, wondering as he sleeps. What if she hadn't accepted Aang as he was, what if she'd stopped comforting and stood her ground. What if she'd demanded he change. Because that was something Aang could never do, wasn't it? He never had to change. He could be an airbender when there weren't any others, hold the moral high ground when no one else had either the ability or the willingness. There was always a way out, a way around, and she'd let him take it. He didn't understand family, not really, and she'd let him live like an airbender. He didn't understand the world, and she'd protected him from what she could and comforted him for what she could not. Kya and Bumi suffered for it; she suffered for it. Maybe even the world suffered for it. And yet, what if she'd screamed into the wind? What then?

But there's no use wondering. Zuko leaves her in the cold grey of early morning a day before Izumi's ship reaches them. She'd drifted off to sleep in a chair next to his pallet, holding his warm hand, and she'd woken to ice in her palm. Izumi takes her father home. Zuko is laid to rest in the Fire Nation, and, a few days after his funeral, Katara walks to the top of the caldera and screams. The wind caresses her face as it steals her voice. Just as she knew it would.

 _AN:_

 _So I was watching LoK a while back, and I wondered the same thing a lot of people have. If Aang was such a lacking father, why didn't Katara ever kick his butt and set him straight? My plan was to figure that out. It didn't really happen that way, because you know how stories go. You sit down to write and they do their own thing, and before you know it you've lost the characters. I wrote Bumi's story, in particular, much differently than I planned. Oops. In the end, I think it was an exploration of Team Avatar's adulthood, their parenting, how their struggles defined them, that sort of thing, with a good bit of the resentment I suspect Katara must have felt, either toward herself or toward Aang. Anyway, hope you enjoyed it. All feedback is welcome._


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